The organizational change necessitates making the company dynamic, competitive and responsive. However, people are prone to resist for fear of unseen challenges. If the concerns of employees are not properly tackled and redressed, there is a fair chance that the change initiative may boomerang. The people issues are managed by HR; thus, in case of any change initiative called for by the organization—whether incremental or transformational—the role of HR becomes vital. This article makes an effort to portray the various roles that evolve for HR with other inherent issues and challenges that HR faces in the course of such organic drive with success.
The perception of `organiza- tional change' is mainly used for `organization-wide change' and not reckoned if the change is individual or incremental in nature such as change of CEO or creation of a new division. Issues like mergers, acquisitions, collaboration, restructuring, process re-engineering, etc., which have wider scope and long-term impact on the organization are covered under change management. The organization-wide changes are sometimes referred to as `organizational transformation', which is defined as a complete reorientation in the way the organization looks through a wider perspective and prioritizes its functions. The reason for bringing about change may be to achieve business goals to get ready for upcoming competitors or to ensure greater profit margin. The change management is either reactive or proactive in nature depending upon the emerging circumstances and market forces. More specifically, it is reactive when the management is responding to changes in the macro-environment; i.e., the source of the change is external, and it is proactive when the management is initiating the change in order to achieve a desired goal _ the source of the change being internal. However, during the recent past, due to rapid technological changes and ever-rising expectations of the much informed customer as well as ingestion of mantras of self-sustenance, key drivers of organization have become customer-centric. Thus, the style of management has changed considerably and organizations, nowadays, are becoming more prone to change.
In general, industries are moving away from individual decision-making authority and unit-focussed accountability to group or team accountability in an open-communication environment based on system-oriented thinking. The reporting relation and hierarchical structure of managers are also relentlessly changing. All these have made changes inevitable across the sector _ from the old economy to the new economy sector, or from government run businesses to individually-headed business houses.
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